Southern California, the land of arid winds and heat-retardant cacti, is forced to brave wildfires every year. Sadly, it’s almost common to hear of a small brush fire turned large-scale evacuation from the months of May to October.
But as any Californian will tell you, the fires that recently gripped the Greater Los Angeles Area have been nothing short of unprecedented.
“We’re facing a historic natural disaster,” said L.A. County Office of Emergency Management Director Kevin McGowan during a Press Conference according to Time.
Turbulent Santa Ana winds combined with the weakened and dry shrubbery that adorn so many hillsides in the area combined to create many of the fires in the region that continued to grow for days after ignition despite firefighters’ attempts at containment.
The Palisades fire which spanned most of the Pacific Palisades Coastal neighborhood and stretched to parts of Malibu is attributed with destroying 6,380 structures according to the City of Malibu. Accompanied by other fires such as the Eaton Fire in Altadena and Kenneth Fire in the San Fernando Valley, all contribute to the total 40,000 acres burned in less than a couple of days according to Cal Matters.
Despite its record-breaking nature, these fires were entirely anticipated and seemingly not successfully prepared for.
“The National Weather Service reported wind gusts of close to 100 miles an hour in a region that had received close to zero precipitation with a season of very warm conditions,” says Stanford Professor Noah Diffenbaugh in an interview with Time. “That is a very high-risk situation. And it was forecast in advance,” he continues.
When understanding the horrible combination of variables that led to the fires, it’s impossible not to question how a region slightly larger than the entire District of Columbia was left in a cloud of smoke for so long.
Where were the preventative measures like brush trimming to prevent such fast spreading? Where was the water pressure and electricity in Pacific Palisades when residents and firefighters felt the blaze was at its apex?
Many politicians have sought to immediately throw any blame associated with the fires on environmental programs throughout the state focusing on aquatic life.
In particular, President Donald Trump immediately took to social media accounts to cite a small fish called a smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as cause for the disaster according to Vox. Many have critiqued this argument, not only for being poorly timed, but also for being incorrect.
The project President Trump and other politicians have pointed fingers at is a water pumping system that was enacted to try to grow declining numbers in the Delta Smelt population. Although seemingly insignificant, the tiny species serve as food for numerous other species in the area and serve as a foundation for the Delta’s food web.
Their survival was crucial to the ecosystem and for that reason efforts to protect the species through limiting the amount of water farmers could use from the Delta were enacted. The program itself is not designed to ‘send freshwater out to sea’, unlike opponents of it claim. It only limits the amount of water used for agriculture in the region.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin weighed in on the project stating, “A faceless government is taking away their lifeline, water, all because of a 3-inch fish, where I come from, a 3-inch fish, we call that bait,” according to Vox.
Farmers dislike the program because it takes water away from farms, but it is a lot easier to villainize the Delta Smelt and its conservation efforts for allegedly ‘stealing water from the LA Fire Effort’ even when in reality that is not the case.
The disaster’s timing and intensity are undeniably symptoms of a larger climate and environmental shift.
“It’s almost a no-brainer, because when you see the intensity and the frequency, that gives you the answer. We don’t even have a fire season anymore. It’s not like, okay, these few months it’s all year round at this point. So there’s no way we can refute the data we are getting,” says CCHS Environmental Science Teacher Mrs. DasGupta on the fire’s connection to climate change.
Politician’s failure to recognize disasters like these as being caused by unlucky chance and quickly increasing climate change have created the narrative that fires like that in L.A. are a political issue. The news cycle has moved on from the people of LA and all that was lost in less than a week.
Rather than using that time to spread understanding of the environmental shifts that caused the fires and the empathy and compassion we must have for victims, that time was spent trying to harness disaster for political gain. What should have been focused on was the support and compassion that is seeping out of these communities although still struggling.
The American Red Cross reported providing over 9,400 overnight shelters and 90,000 meals to those in LA. Paramount pledged to donate One Million Dollars to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation, and clothing brands like Alo and Urban Outfitters have made entire floors of their stores and warehouses free and open to the public to help those who have lost everything, according to LA Magazine.
As we look towards the future as good stewards, we shouldn’t only work to help others, but also to do the small preventative measures for earth.
“Little things we don’t realize, and as silly as it sounds, the motto reuse, reduce, recycle is what should be our, you know, mantra, if you want to do our little bit to save the world” says Mrs. DasGupta.
There may not be a concrete answer as to why something this devastating would happen. Nature, especially in such a turbulent ecological time, is unwavering and will continue to inflict disasters like these.
But with more interference in the realm of environmental conservation, climate change, and natural disaster preparation, there is hope for a world where blame isn’t thrown on a three-inch fish and is rather shifted onto ourselves.
